The shocking statistic that about one in five women will be the victim of sexual assault while in college is made even more so by the fact that most of those women will know their assailants. No one-size-fits-all approach ...

Most discrimination in the U.S. is not caused by intention to harm people different from us, but by ordinary favoritism directed at helping people similar to us, according to a theoretical review published online in American ...

Divorce is associated with an increased risk of future depressive episodes but only for those who already have a history of depression, according to a new study published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the ...

(Medical Xpress)—Experiencing a positive family climate as a teenager may be connected to your relationships later in life, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for ...

(Medical Xpress)—Men and women who are expectant parents have different stress reactions to relationship conflict, according to researchers at Penn State, who studied couples expecting their first child. In addition, recovery ...

Every ten years or so, someone will make the observation that there is a lack of political diversity among psychological scientists and a discussion about what ought to be done ensues. The notion that the field discriminates ...

As president of the International Society for Research on Aggression (IRSA) and with consent of the organization's elected council, Craig Anderson appointed an international Media Violence Commission last December to prepare ...

(HealthDay) -- A new survey finds that an overwhelming majority of parents think social media isn't necessarily a bad thing for their children.

Aug 16, 2012

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Hostility

Hostility (also called inimicality) is a form of angry internal rejection or denial in psychology. It is a part of personal construct psychology, developed by George Kelly. In everyday speech it is more commonly used as a synonym for anger and aggression.

In psychological terms, Kelly defined hostility as the willful refusal to accept evidence that one's perceptions of the world are in some way askew from or out of alignment with objective reality. Instead of realigning one's feelings and thoughts with objective reality, the hostile person attempts to force or coerce the world to fit their view, even if this is a forlorn hope, and even if it entails varying degrees of emotional expenditure or harm to self and others.

While challenging "apparent reality" with alternative approaches can be a useful part of life, and persistence in the face of failure is often a valuable trait in the fields of invention or discovery, in the case of hostility there is the distinction that the evidence is not accurately assessed when the decision is made to repeat the same approach. Instead the evidence is suppressed or denied, and deleted from awareness - the unfavorable evidence which might suggest that a prior belief is flawed is to various degrees ignored and willfully avoided. Metaphorically, it can be said that reality is being held for ransom, and in this sense hostility is a form of psychological extortion - an attempt to force reality to produce the desired feedback, in order that preconceptions become validated. In this sense, hostility is a response that forms part of discounting of unwanted cognitive dissonance.